Having Devil Of A Time In Heaven On Earth

July 22, 1985|By Rob Morse of the Sentinel Staff

The other day a TV talk show host asked what I will miss about Central Florida after I have moved to the Left Coast. My first answer was ''everything.'' Then I amended that to ''everything but the palmetto bugs and the humidity.'' Let me amend that statement some more.

Even chamber of commerce honchos can agree that this wonderful place has other imperfections besides billions of panzerlike bugs and oceans of water in the air. It's heaven on earth, sure, but like everything else on earth the kinks haven't been worked out yet.

Hey, guys, there are a few things that need fixing here, and I'm not coming back before they are fixed. Well, at least until some of them are fixed.

Take Florida housing developments, for example. I'm not against housing developments per se, but look at the kinds of things that are going up around here.

Never mind the questionable construction, the lack of trees and the baroque rules against children, pets and painting the garage doors anything but puce. Developers have to change the names of these places. Most of the names are designed to conjure up images of New England, California, or someplace distant from Florida. If I wanted to live in a place called Beacon Hill or Sausalito, I wouldn't have moved here. Do you suppose there is a housing development in Sausalito, Calif., called Orlando? You bet there isn't. There aren't even housing developments.

As a matter of fact, why give these developments names at all? They are all the same -- sort of like Soviet workers' housing with spas, garages and a clubhouse. Just give developments numbers like Red Bug Lake Road No. 14 or Wekiva Springs Road No. 67.

It probably is the frustration of trying to get back and forth to work from the themed workers' housing in places like Longwood or Casselberry that causes the next problem with Florida. That is, the tendency of Floridians to drive like Conan the Barbarian on a particularly vicious designer drug.

Florida drivers think traffic lights are year-round Christmas decorations, with different colors to be admired by the driver as he speeds by underneath. Florida drivers always have wondered what that little stick is on the side of the steering column. They have heard it causes lights to flash on the right and left sides of the car, but for the life of them they can't figure out why anyone would want to put on such a display.

Florida drivers may average 55, but that is because half of them are staggering along at 25, while the other half is swaggering along at 85. It is a bad mix out there on the Florida highways: like putting a stock-car race and a potato-sack race on the same track.

Florida drivers also can't deal with bicycles. When they come upon a bicyclist, they either run him off the road or swerve 10 feet around him into the other lane and try to cause a head-on collision. There is little moderation in this great state of Florida, on the highways or elsewhere.

That lack of moderation characterizes the Florida approach to the environment. Floridians love the unspoiled beauty of nature, partly because there is nothing like being the first one to plant a beer can or trailer sign in the middle of it.

I would like to know how many Florida members of the Sierra Club have lawns. I'll bet the majority do. And after protesting the latest incursion into the Everglades by an oil company building a road, they go home and call a herbicide company because there are signs of chinch bug damage (''Be sure to water it in,'' says the technician -- be sure to get it into the aquifer). Lawns have got to go. They have no more business being in Florida than the Kodiak bear. Besides, St. Augustine grass isn't grass. It's just immature barbed wire.

Lawns planted where scrub should be, developments that look like unripened slums, shopping centers next door to shopping centers -- sometimes, if you squint your eyes, that is all Central Florida seems to be. And of course there are the traffic jams, consisting of thousands of people going to the shopping center to buy weed-and-feed for the patch of St. Augustine in front of their New England-theme townhouses.

There is a lot more to Central Florida than this chain of unnature, but sometimes it's a little hard to see the forest for the tree.